1. Field of the Invention
The field of application of the invention is "human medicine", wherein there exists a continuing need to further understand and demonstrate the human body biochemical reactions and resultant physiological functions for a variety of urgent purposes, as summarized in the expansion of the CHART System name. "Chart", the term commonly used by clinical practitioners and other healthcare delivery organization staff to refer to a patient's medical record in its typical paper/hard-copy form, is used herein as an acronym (devised by the inventor of the instant application) to designate the principal areas of medical and healthcare activity--clinical, heuristic, administrative, research and teaching--on which the subject of the instant application is designed to have facilitating otherwise beneficial affects.
The field of implementation of the invention is "computer science" in general and "Web-object programming" in particular (for which the Java language is a typical but non-exclusive example of an applicable programming language). The object-oriented software attributes of "inheritance", "encapsulation" and "polymorphism" (described below) provide the information system language characteristics and processing capabilities required to implement the features and functions necessitated by the field of application.
2. Description of the Related Technology
A non-exhaustive review of the medical informatics literature and the patent file search described above reveals that a major category of the related technology, embracing a preponderance of existing computer-based representations of human physiology, are representations of physiological function and/or anatomical structure localized to a particular medical specialty, pathology and/or human body morphological component (e.g.--central nervous system structure, cardiac function, genome mapping).
A second category of computer-based representations, typically as or more specific and narrow in scope than the first, provides automated diagnostic assistance or other clinical decision support through the evolutionary application of mathematicaiboolean algorithms or, more recently, expert system or neural network technology (e.g.--the "HELP System" developed at Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, late in the 1960s and subsequently purchased, modified and marketed by several national hospital information system vendors).
A third category of medical computer systems is called the "electronic medical record" (EMR) or "computer-based patient record" (CPR)--the principal focus of attention during the past two decades, primarily through the efforts of the Computer-based Patient Record Institute (CPRI). Systems in this category address the issues of medical record content, utility and confidentiality in an effort to define, design and develop a computer-based "chart", the common practice name for the paper-based medical record as defined above. The principal purpose of the computer-based chart is to make patient-specific information available to clinicians when and where it is needed in order to facilitate more efficient, effective and (therefore) economical pathology diagnosis and treatment, and ongoing patient care including clinical monitoring.